When you release early and often, you’re bound to churn through new customers. I showed you in my last post how to measure the funnel of trial to activation to engagement, but what should you do with all the people that didn’t make it? Today I’ll share a technique that’s a nice complement to a more traditional exit interview — I call it the Abandonment Email.
The idea behind this email is to give churned customers a quick way to summarize why they’re no longer using your product. After you haven’t seen them for some period of time (a week? two weeks?), you send them an email that looks something like this:
We haven’t seen you at Wibbles in a while, and we figured you’ve moved on. Before you go, do you have a minute to tell us what went wrong?
It didn’t work
It was confusing…
I don’t need it
Something else
Chances are some of these customers won’t even remember why they signed up for Wibbles, but most will. You might even get direct responses asking for help. For those that have a spare 30 seconds, clicking on a link will take them to a “Thanks” landing page (bonus points for a discount or re-engagement tactic). You can build a funnel in KISSmetrics to measure how effective these emails are, and you’ll get something that looks like this:
Here’s where it gets interesting: if you use KISSmetrics’ URL API, you can record all of their answers in the same system that tracked their behavior in your app:
http://wibbles.com/landing?kme=Responded+to+email+survey&kmi=bob%40example.com&km_survey_choice=It+didn’t+workNow you can revisit some of the core flows in your app, but filter to the lens of “confusing.” Did those customers all get stuck in the same place? Was there a key step in the process they missed? Perhaps they all used a certain browser like IE that didn’t render a key call to action button.
For this particular example, I did some homework and realized most people that called the app confusing came from a direct link and never saw our intro/landing page. D’oh! I offered them another free month and a live screen sharing session to show them how things worked. The response was positive, and we salvaged a bunch of customers that would have never converted without this abandonment email.
Perhaps this example makes more sense in the context of a free trial or SaaS app, but hopefully I’ve planted the seed for what you can build as re-engagement and learning tools. Do you have a tried and true email you use to capture churned users?
I really like your philosophy to ‘figure out reasons of customer walkaway (and improve on that to retain future customers)’ and I definitely think that strategically you’re on right track.
What puzzles me is the legibility of the conclusions drawn on that ‘mini exit questionnaire’ filled out by 7% of the people…
In plain English, I meant to say two things:
a) base of answers 3,6,2 and 1 is not really good base to draw any conclusions from. That needs to be few dozens or hundred to make any conclusion.
b) The options of the exit questionnaire offered seen biased and suggesting to select ‘It was confusing’ rather than any other option. (My hypothesis is that with the larger answer base the ‘it was confusing’ would become WAAAAAY larger than other options. Thus may prove that the options offered were biased and suggested that option).
c) Nevertheless your approach is genious! Because what you did – based on that ‘abandonment email’ – you have:
1) listened to what they had to ‘say’ (feedback of questionnaire)
1a) You have analysed the user flow etc.
2) contacted people (established personal contact – check)
3) you have offered them ‘added value’ with personal touch(your personal screencasts + extra free month of trial.
So all of those as you had said before have resulted in bringing share of thouse who really needed your app back.
As I said in the beginning – i admire your ‘fight for every customer’ philosophy. But here I want to give personal opinion:
It’s not the poll results which helped you, and possibly the they would leave anyways even if they had seen the landing page or didn’t use IE. What helped you are the 3steps above:
1) listen to what they have to say
2) establish personal contact
3) offer them personal and extra value.
So my suggestion would be:
As there will always be users who will leave: send them abandonment email, make some options to select. But after they choose their option, send ‘personal’ email to all of the ones who have clicked. Assume that this is not ‘statistical survey’ but rather bait to figure out who still cares enough about your app to click on the feedback post.
Then think about how to increase amount of people viewed this email (now you have 54, what if it would have been 104?). Next think (probably on the wording or layout of the emailr or smth) how to make the laste conversion (12 people responded) more efficient (into 94 responded out of 104 viewed).
sorry for putting my thoughts here,
Dimitry
February 26, 2013 at 4:32 pm